What is a Rune
Page 28
[←91]
Bataille’s essays have been translated and published as The Cradle of Humanity: Prehistoric Art and Culture, trans. Michelle Kendall and Stuart Kendall (New York: Zone Books, 2005).
[←92]
Lewis-Williams, 249.
[←93]
Lewis-Williams, 190.
[←94]
Campbell, 301.
[←95]
Mircea Eliade, Shamanism: Archaic Techniques of Ecstasy, trans. Willard R. Trask (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1964), 380. Of course, this again involves making comparisons between European and non-European traditions. This can be valid, but as I have argued it is an approach that rests on questionable assumptions about human differences (or the lack of them), and most scholars and readers are insufficiently attuned to these problems.
[←96]
See Peter Kingsley, Reality (Inverness, Cal.: Golden Sufi Press, 2004).
[←97]
The language of “mental or cognitive act” is problematic, but I am using it here because the alternatives would only puzzle readers, and raise more issues than they resolve. What I am really talking about is a state of the soul or spirit. (The German word Geist best expresses what it is that has ekstasis. Although we will see in a moment that we do not have ekstasis; it has us.)
[←98]
“Object” here simply means something that a subject is aware of. It does not have to be a physical object. It could be an aspect of a thing, rather than a thing itself (e.g., the color red, which is never found on its own, but is always a quality of an object). The object could also be one’s self.
[←99]
See “The Gifts of Odin and His Brothers.” My treatment of the idea of “openness to Being,” which draws inspiration from Heidegger, begins with my essay “Knowing the Gods,” and is further developed in “Summoning the Gods.” These two essays are anthologized in Summoning the Gods. The concept of ekstasis is latent in these two essays, and named for the first time and developed in “The Gifts of Odin and His Brothers” and “The Fourfold.”
[←100]
This form of ekstasis is a kind of “gestalt switch” of the first.
[←101]
Schopenhauer has in mind “the Idea” in the sense of Platonic form. My discussion of essence does not make any such metaphysical commitment (i.e., I am not wedded to the position that essences are non-spatio-temporal objects existing in another realm). In the discussion of Schopenhauer that follows, one must simply factor out the Platonic metaphysical connotations of “Idea.”
[←102]
Arthur Schopenhauer, The World as Will and Representation, vol. 1, trans. E. F. J. Payne (New York: Dover Publications, 1969), 178–79.
[←103]
Ibid., 179.
[←104]
Ibid., 184–85.
[←105]
Cleary, Summoning the Gods, 30.
[←106]
Again I must caution my readers that while I do derive a great deal of inspiration from Heidegger, I am departing from him in other ways and developing and applying his ideas in ways he would not endorse. For example, while Heidegger does famously employ the concept of Ekstase, my use of this term is different from his.
[←107]
Martin Heidegger, Introduction to Metaphysics, trans. Gregory Fried and Richard Polt (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2000), 86.
[←108]
Fried and Polt, 86.
[←109]
Fried and Polt, 182.
[←110]
Fried and Polt, 186. The bracketed interpolation is my own. The italics are in the original.
[←111]
Rather different examples would be a knight’s coat of arms, or a monogram. These are symbols that refer to individuals.
[←112]
Koko the gorilla is basically a hoax perpetrated by unwitting hoaxsters engaged in a great deal of wishful thinking.
[←113]
Fried and Polt, 150.
[←114]
I hasten to note that it has little relationship to how I use the term “will” in my essays “Knowing the Gods” and “The Gifts of Odin and His Brothers.”
[←115]
Wade, 164.
[←116]
Wade, 165.
[←117]
See “The Gifts of Odin and His Brothers” for a discussion of the equivocal nature of Odin, the god of ekstasis.
[←118]
The translation is by Thomas G. West and Grace Starry West, in Four Texts on Socrates (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1984), 131 (lines 374–80); 175 (lines 1468–71).
[←119]
Schopenhauer writes: “First of all, a knowing individual raises himself in the manner described to the pure subject of knowing, and at the same time raises the contemplated object to the Idea; the world as representation then stands out whole and pure, and the complete objectification of the will takes place, for only the Idea is the adequate objectivity of the will. In itself, the Idea includes object and subject in like manner, for these are its sole form. In it, however, both are of entirely equal weight; and as the object also is here nothing but the representation of the subject, so the subject, by passing entirely into the perceived object, has also become that object itself, since the entire consciousness is nothing more than its most distinct image.” Schopenhauer, 179–80.
[←120]
Bataille, 60.
[←121]
Ibid., 60.
[←122]
I should note that there is a controversy about this image. Most authors have based their interpretation of it on a famous sketch made by Abbé Breuil. But some scholars (including Ronald Hutton) have claimed that the sketch is inaccurate. Among other things, they assert that the antlers are not present in the original. However, Jean Clottes—a major figure in scholarship on the cave art—has defended Breuil’s drawing, pointing out that since the figure is part etching, part sketch, it is easy to miss certain features if the image is not seen in the proper light, from the proper angle, etc. In particular, some features may show up poorly in photographs (which is the only “access” to the image that the vast majority of interested parties will ever have, since direct, physical access to all the caves is heavily restricted).
[←123]
G. W. F. Hegel, The Philosophy of Nature, trans. A. V. Miller (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1970), 15 (paragraph number 247).
[←124]
Quoted in Campbell, Primitive Mythology, 304.
[←125]
Bataille, 40, 50.
[←126]
There are incomplete female sketches, or sketches of female parts. Vulvas, for example—as in the aforementioned image from the Chauvet Cave, where the legs of a bison and lion form a vulva.
[←127]
The notable exception is the Venus of Brassempouy, which is a highly stylized face in any case.
[←128]
Can we assume that the artists were male? Archaeologist Dean Snow of Pennsylvania State University recently published a study of the handprints left in the caves, which were made either by dipping the hand in paint and pressing it against the cave wall, or by spraying (spitting) paint around the hand. Comparing relative finger lengths (men’s ring fingers tend to be longer than their index fingers; women’s about the same) Snow concluded that 75% of the handprints were left by women. Several news agencies and magazines duly reported the good news that “most of the cave art was done by women!” National Geographic was especially enthusiastic about Snow’s research. No wonder: it was supported by the National Geographic Society’s Committee for Research and Exploration.
But there are numerous problems here. First, we don’t know that the people who left the handprints were the same people who did the art (the handprints are not “signatures” found at the lower right corner of paintings!).
Further, out of hundreds of such prints, Snow’s study only deals with 32. Most, he reported, were too smudged or indistinct to be stud
ied carefully. This could be true—but obviously, the potential here for “cherry- picking” the evidence is very great. Other scientists have studied the same issue and arrived at very different results. One concluded that the majority of prints were left by adolescent boys.
Finally, we must confront the fact that throughout history the vast majority of artists have been male, especially the further we go back in history. But political correctness demands that this not be mentioned. And one may be sure that ideology is at the back of Snow’s study, and the publicity it received. In one interview he states, “There has been a male bias in the literature for a long time. People have made a lot of unwarranted assumptions about who made these things, and why.” One wonders if he sees it as his mission to correct this bias, and if this has colored
his judgment. See http://news.nationalgeographic.com/news/2013/
10/131008-women-handprints-oldest-neolithic-cave-art/
[←129]
Aristotle, Metaphysics, trans. Joe Sachs (Santa Fe: Green Lion Press, 1999), 1 (980a21).
[←130]
C. G. Jung, Collected Works of C. G. Jung, vol. 9 (Part 1), trans. R. F. C. Hull (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1969), 95–96.
[←131]
This theory is, in fact, structurally similar to Aristotle’s two-tiered understanding of teleology—with the difference that Hegel immanentizes God by making him/it identical with the whole.
[←132]
Errol E. Harris, Cosmos and Anthropos (Atlantic Highlands, New Jersey: Humanities Press International, 1991), 71.
[←133]
These are not forms or ideas in the Platonic sense. Hegel believes that they exist, but not “apart” from the things that express them. (They may be thought apart, however.) In this, Hegel is quite close to Aristotle.
[←134]
Harris, 49.
[←135]
Harris, 50–51.
[←136]
Harris, 50–51.
[←137]
This does not imply that no new forms will come into existence after man, or that present forms will not change. After the climax of a story, things often continue to happen until the actual end. Man is the climax of the story of creation—unless there is in fact some higher form of consciousness, carrier of a still more adequate expression of the universe’s self-knowing, which has yet to appear.
[←138]
Harris, 143.
[←139]
This is, of course, a controversial idea in physics, and it has been expressed in a variety of forms (some “strong,” some “weak”). Harris discusses these ideas at length in Cosmos and Anthropos.
[←140]
G. W. F. Hegel, Elements of the Philosophy of Right, ed. Allen W. Wood, trans. H. B. Nisbet (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991), 379 (§ 358). Italics in original.
[←141]
Ibid., 45. I have rendered Geist as “spirit,” however, rather than Nisbet’s choice of “mind.”
[←142]
I am perfectly willing to admit, as I have in other essays, that there are profundities in so-called “Eastern philosophy.” The problem, however, is that these texts or movements are called “philosophy”—i.e., understood on analogy with Western philosophy—only very loosely. Western philosophy is animated by a spirit of individualism: each man searches for truth, placing nothing above the judgment of reason. “Eastern philosophy” mostly eschews argument and critical thinking, and its adherents are expected to accept the claims of sages without question.
[←143]
These figures come from Charles Murray’s Human Accomplishment: The Pursuit of Excellence in the Arts and Sciences, 800 B.C. to 1950 (New York: HarperCollins, 2003), cited in Ricardo Duchesne, The Uniqueness of Western Civilization (Leiden-Boston: Brill, 2011), 292–93.
[←144]
See my review of Ricardo Duchesne’s The Uniqueness of Western Civilization in North American New Right, vol. 2, ed. Greg Johnson (San Francisco: Counter-Currents, 2015).
[←145]
This essay is dedicated to George Hocking.
[←146]
However, I distinguish between Ásatrú and Odinism. Odinism is the path of one who seeks to become Odin. See my essay “What is Odinism” in TYR, vol. 4 (North Augusta, South Carolina: Ultra, 2014).
[←147]
See Nancy L. Segal, Born Together—Reared Apart: The Landmark Minnesota Twin Study (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2012); and Nancy L. Segal, Entwined Lives: Twins and What They Tell Us About Human Behavior (New York: Plume, 2000).
[←148]
I am not seriously proposing this as an experiment that could ever actually be carried out. I am proposing a thought experiment intended to highlight the fact that the similarities between what the twins would create must be attributed, at least in part, to genetic similarity.
[←149]
See James Russell, The Germanization of Early Medieval Christianity: A Sociohistorical Approach to Religious Transformation (New York: Oxford University Press, 1994).
[←150]
Oswald Spengler, The Decline of the West, vol. I, trans. Charles Francis Atkinson (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1926), 185–86
[←151]
Spengler, 185–86.
[←152]
Carl Schmitt, The Concept of the Political, trans. George Schwab (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2007), 27.
[←153]
Studies have shown that in multicultural neighborhoods distrust is high, even among members of the same ethnic group. See Robert Putnam, “E Pluribus Unum: Diversity and Community in the Twenty-first Century—The 2006 Johan Skytte Prize Lecture,” Scandinavian Political Studies 30.2 (2007): 137–74.
[←154]
J. G. Fichte, The Vocation of Man, trans. Peter Preuss (Indianapolis: Hackett Publishing, 1987), 14–15. It should be noted that here Fichte is taking a position he believes to be completely legitimate and rationally defensible—but also one that he does not himself endorse. The argument of the text is a complicated one.
[←155]
See my essay “What is Odinism?” in TYR: Myth, Culture, Tradition, Vol. 4 (North Augusta, South Carolina: Ultra, 2014).
[←156]
In this essay I will be utilizing the translation by Gregory Fried and Richard Polt (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2000), 35. The translators here use “How does it stand with Being?” (Heidegger translations tend to be highly stilted and literal, as Heidegger chooses his words very carefully and the sense of what he is trying to say can easily be lost in translation). However, in a footnote they suggest the more natural “What about Being?”
[←157]
Fried and Polt, 15–16.
[←158]
Fried and Polt, 15.
[←159]
Michael Zimmerman writes, “Faced with overpowering Being, the ancient Greek mood was astonishment. Faced with the utter meaninglessness of the modern industrial wasteland, the modern German moods are horror and boredom.” Michael E. Zimmerman, “The Ontological Decline of the West,” in A Companion to Heidegger’s Introduction to Metaphysics, ed. Richard Polt and Gregory Fried (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2001), 189.
[←160]
Fried and Polt, 40.
[←161]
Bracketed phrase added by Heidegger for the 1953 edition.
[←162]
Fried and Polt, 40–41. In a later passage (p. 47) he reiterates much of this emphatically: “We said: on the earth, all over it, a darkening of the world is happening. The essential happenings in this darkening are: the flight of the gods, the destruction of the earth, the reduction of human beings to a mass, the preeminence of the mediocre.” “The preeminence of the mediocre” sounds like a Nietzschean point, and Heidegger was strongly influenced by Nietzsche. Here he refers to the “leveling effect” of modernity’s reign of quantity.
[←163]
See Cleary, Summoning the Gods, 4.
[←164]
Fried and Polt
, 40. See also pp. 47–48.
[←165]
Fried and Polt, pp. 48–49; bracketed phrase added by Heidegger in 1953.
[←166]
Fried and Polt, 41. Bracketed portion is my interpolation.
[←167]
Fried and Polt, 52–53. Michael Zimmerman writes “In Heidegger’s opinion, a linguistic and spiritual revolution is needed to renew German history and to save the Volk from modern decadence” (Zimmerman, 187).
[←168]
My purpose here is to summarize, in a rather simplified form, Heidegger’s claims about our “being” words. Whatever errors there may be in these etymologies are in Heidegger’s original.
[←169]
Fried and Polt, 76.
[←170]
Fried and Polt, 86.
[←171]
Fried and Polt, 182.
[←172]
Fried and Polt, 153.
[←173]
Fried and Polt, 150.
[←174]
Fried and Polt, 186. The bracketed interpolation is my own.
[←175]
Fried and Polt, 213.
[←176]